To Make A Fire

Some weeks ago, I walked away from the city’s obligations without a compass. I had spent so long trading my daylight for someone else’s dream that I forgot what made my blood warm. What an unfathomable kind of grief, waking up one morning to realize you have gone completely cold to your own fire.

So we flew south, back to the coordinates of my mother’s blood. October in Sanya and the autumn breeze is a merciful god undoing the knots in my hair. I have crossed a thousand oceans, chased horizons from Miami to the Adriatic, yet nothing holds a torch to the way the sky breaks open here, dusk and dawn passing crowns over the South China Sea.

The past, served on indigenous platters at dinner: wild, sour, and fermented with memory. I listened to our table, a choir of many tongues, dialects braided over clinking bowls, Cantonese, Mandarin, Hainanese, and the secret language of three girls raised like feral boys. My sister, cousin, and I, triple trouble with scraped knees and sun-darkened shins, a little hurricane that left the whole village breathless and our elders shaking their heads, laughing until our stomachs hurt. My sister has a husband now, and here we are introducing him to the soil that made us unbreakable.

Funny how life works, stepping off the ledge with no plan, yet the universe doesn’t let you hit the ground. It just sends you home.

There are things I can only confess to the tide, like how terrified I was, of the blank page waiting in Hong Kong, the freefall of not knowing what comes next after having spent a lifetime living by a script.

But at dawn, I watched the Sanya sunrise spill its first light across the bay, molten gold coloring the edge of the coconut trees. For the first time in years, I laid down the weight I had been carrying and just let the ocean hold me.

My skin is toasted bronze, salt-slick and honest. The coastal winds move through my ribs until the trembling stops. I look at the girl in the water, and I remember. She is the wildfire. She is the untamed current. She is the monsoon. She does not need a calling to know her own magnitude.

The cabin lights will dim tonight, the plane will touch down on the concrete, and the future, still a house without furniture.

But look at the horizon, lifted like the hem of a golden dress. I am carrying my childhood home in my chest without spilling a drop. I have my roots and my breath. And I ignite.